Conversations with the Past: Northeast Harbor in Home Movies

Of the many experiences that I had while making Summer Colony, there were few more fascinating than the long stretches spent sifting through hours of other people’s home movie footage in search of tidbits to include in the workprints that I assembled between 2010 and 2012. The ability to sit down with the footage, to absorb and study events long past provided a great diversion from the chore of searching through hours of my own footage in search of a coherent narrative.

Between Christmas of 1960 and the autumn of 1975, my father Durlin Lunt shot thousands of feet of color, silent 8mm footage. Years later he spliced the individual fifty-foot rolls of film onto five large reels, in rough chronological order, and in 2007 I hired a friend in Canada to transfer those reels onto digital video. The film had been stored in our attic for decades, where it was exposed to dangerously shifting temperatures, including many summers of hot, sticky heat. Despite these far from ideal conditions, the quality of the video transfer was surprisingly good. Some of the very early footage was shrunken and blurry. In other spots it was overly ragged and damaged, while in other places the color quality had shifted to extremes of blue, yellow or red. Yet where it looked nice it usually looked very nice, and many of the color problems could be remedied – or at least mitigated – through the application of modern video editing tools.

Not all of the material on those 8mm reels is likely to be of interest to persons who are not members or friends of the Lunt family. But mixed in between scenes of domestic life on Maple Lane and visits to the family’s cabin on Alamoosook Lake there were shots and scenes that will fascinate anybody with even a passing interest in the history of Mount Desert Island or Maine as a whole. We uncovered footage of summer naval visits to Bar Harbor, and lengthy scenes aboard the Maine Maritime Academy’s training vessel as it traversed the St. Lawrence River en route to the Expo 67 in Montreal. There were clips aboard the sailboat of TV star Garry Moore and glimpses of Boeing 747 pilots practicing takeoffs and landings at Bangor International Airport (which was a favored location for airlines to train new, green pilots due to its long runway and minimum of commercial traffic).

As to the material pertaining to Northeast Harbor itself, no segment was more dramatic than the minute and eight seconds filmed on the afternoon of August 5th, 1965, when a fire struck the DesIsles block on Main Street, burning the building to a shell that was later bulldozed. My father happened to have a roll of film already loaded into his camera that day and captured as much of the action as he could. The resulting footage shows volunteer firefighters climbing ladders, breaking windows and spraying water into the doomed structure as crowds of onlookers gather on the street. And luckily for me, the fire footage was in much better condition than much of the other material around it on the five reels, and it needed little restoration work. Much of it will appear in Summer Colony.

The 1965 fire was followed a second fire in December 1966, which destroyed the village’s only movie house, the Pastime Theater, along with half a dozen other structures. The 1966 fire still looms large in the memory of the villagers, so much so that the 1965 fire is often confused with it or forgotten entirely. Yet many believe that the 1966 blaze would have been even worse had it not been for the earlier fire, as the DesIsles block stood next to the structures that would burn the following year, and the lot that it had stood on was still vacant in December of 1966, very likely preventing an even larger chunk of Main Street from burning down. No footage of the 1966 fire is known to exist, although there are a handful of dramatic black and white photographs of the blaze in the archives of the Northeast Harbor Library.

My father’s home movies were not the only film and video footage I was able to draw on for Summer Colony, although they were the least expensive to utilize. I also had the pleasure of seeing Herbert Kenney’s Mount Desert home movies from the late twenties and early thirties. Kenney was a New England businessman who at one point owned both the Harbourside Inn and the Pastime Theater in Northeast Harbor. There is a hilarious, though possibly apocryphal, story that Kenney once got into a fight with his wife over going to the post office in Somesville, a chore that was necessary because the Pastime had just finished showing a movie and the film print needed to be shipped to the next theater that booked the feature, otherwise its audience would not have anything to watch, and for whatever reason the post office in Northeast Harbor was not suitable for this task. As the story goes, Kenney did not want to do it, but was eventually prodded (or bullied) into getting into his car and making the drive to the post office in Somesville. The other theater got its film print, but the Pastime lost its manger, because Kenney supposedly got back in his car and drove off the island entirely, walking out on both his spouse and his businesses!

From Northeast Historic Film's Herbert Kenney Collection

However Herbert Kenney finally left Northeast Harbor, his 16mm home movies are now preserved in the collections of Bucksport’s Northeast Historic Film, from which I was able to license a number of excerpts. Kenney shot footage of ice fishing on Somes Sound, ice cutting at Upper Hadlock, and even the staff of the Harbourside Inn goofing around for the camera. Perhaps most impressive, though, was the lengthy shot Kenney captured of the steamer J.T. Morse coming into port. Of all the steam vessels that made regular visits to Mount Desert Island, it is the J.T. Morse which is the most extensively documented from a visual standpoint. I cannot even begin to count how many postcards and photographs of this vessel that I’ve seen over the years. Yet this was the first time I or anyone I spoke to had seen any film footage of the ship!

Kenney’s collected home movies have a new shelf mate in the vault at Northeast Historic Film, because as of late last year my father’s 8mm films are now stored there as well. Most of the digital video footage shot for Summer Colony between 2004 and 2012 is also now a part of their collection, including hours of unused clips that couldn't quite make it into the final cut. Perhaps decades from now some future filmmaker, continuing to chart the evolution of the village or the island as a whole, will stumble across some tiny moment in those clips that will make the past flare to light in the same way that it did for me the first time that I watched the J.T. Morse lumber into port in glorious full motion.